Well Worth a ‘Visit’ to Ruby Dee’s World

If Ruby Dee has only one good nerve, as she claims in the title of her solo show at the Canon Theatre, it must be super-jumbo-sized. At age 74, she appears to be in the prime of life. Any performer of any age would envy Dee’s ability to hold an audience for 2 1/2 hours.

Her show is not a bland valedictory, nor is it a searing tell-all. “My One Good Nerve: A Visit With Ruby Dee,” wrote Dee in a program note, is “hits, bits and skits,” mostly written by Dee herself, though she attributes a few lines or verses to others.

The force of Dee’s personality holds it together, but nothing seems forced. The mood is casual and unassuming, though the piece obviously was staged with due diligence by Charles Nelson Reilly. More than anything, it’s funny--did Dee ever moonlight as a comic?

One motivation for this production, Dee wrote, was that “I call myself a reader and I don’t want reading to go out of style.” But if this implies that she’s bound to her script, forget it. She returns to a script occasionally, but for dramatic emphasis, not because it’s a necessary crutch.

Dee arrives with a torrent of rapid rhyme and rhythm that plays off her self-description as a “word monger.” In this, and in the brief thoughts on love that follow, she speaks with sharp precision.

In the next section, she assumes a more relaxed posture, in voice and body, as a reader of jaundiced, rewritten nursery rhymes. Acid humor drips off her tongue with exquisite timing. She rolls her eyes at suggestions of sappiness and at the recorded flute twirpings that accompany her. She toys with a glass of water almost as if it contained something stronger. Interspersed with the rhymes are a few pointed observations on cultural phenomena.

Then it’s time to shift gears again. From behind a lectern, she plays a succession of speakers on overpopulation at a United Nations function, employing a host of accents, posing as men as well as women. Before long, the audience is playfully chanting along with one of the characters.

The first act continues with a portrait of a lonely domestic who used to rent a room from Dee’s family, a meditation on how a mother’s humanity can conflict with a child’s need to see her as perfect, and an amusing dialogue (Dee playing both parts) between a skeptical mother and her attorney daughter who wants to marry an ex-con. This last sketch is set in a variety of locales and played throughout the stage.

A wistful remembrance of childhood summers in the South begins the second act. The tone darkens as Dee recalls a cousin who killed himself and a sister who . . . well, Dee’s regrets about her relationship with her sister are evoked but not spelled out.

Dee is more self-consciously lyrical in the next “bits.” She plays a heedless teenager. She chides a young, unnamed comic about his material; since we don’t know exactly of whom she speaks, this piece is a bit extraneous in an evening that’s long by solo show standards. She eulogizes Marvin Gaye and Tupac Shakur.

She caps the evening with an affectionate fantasy of how her husband, Ossie Davis, courted her “in utero,” thoughts on growing older, and down-to-earth reminiscences of her first real encounter with Davis and their half-century marriage. A rousing seize-the-moment poem becomes an encore.

Dee’s second costume looks better than her first, and a couple of visual design elements--a strobe, colored abstract backdrops--are momentarily distracting. But Jon Gottlieb’s sound design adds considerable atmosphere to this engaging visit with an exemplary spirit.

* “My One Good Nerve: A Visit With Ruby Dee,” Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends July 4. $25-$45. (310) 859-2830. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.